Using Travis CI for Racket projects

(Updated 2014–06–06)

Travis CI is a continuous integration service for open source projects that has nice integration with GitHub.

Whenever you push a commit to GitHub, a build/test can launch. Notification of the result comes via a variety of methods. Also there’s a “badge” to show the build status, which you can link to in your README.md.

For example here’s the badge for Frog, which hopefully says “build passing” when you read this:

One way I’ve seen Travis CI help is with pull requests. When someone submits a PR via GitHub, Travis runs your tests on it. The OK-or-fail result is inserted in the comment thread for that pull request on GitHub. As a result, the contributor gets some feedback, even if they neglected or forgot to run tests themselves. Ideally, the submittor notices and fixes before the acceptor even needs to point out the problem.

I’ve wanted to use Travis CI on my own projects. Mainly I wanted the spiffy badge for my README.md. Seriously, I wanted the other benefits, too. Unfortunately Racket is not one of the dozen languages officially supported by Travis CI.

The proper way to support Racket in Travis CI is, well, the proper way: Making Chef cookbooks. Hopefully someone¹ will do this.

Meanwhile

In the meantime, here’s a work-around.

Add a .travis.yml file to the root of your project. The contents should be something like this:

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language: racket

env:
 - RACKET_VERSION=6.0
 - RACKET_VERSION=HEAD

before_install:
- git clone https://github.com/greghendershott/travis-racket.git
- cat travis-racket/install-racket.sh | bash # pipe to bash not sh!

install:

before_script:

script:
 - /usr/racket/bin/raco make main.rkt
 - /usr/racket/bin/raco test -x .

after_script:

Or simply this:

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env:
 - RACKET_VERSION=6.0
 - RACKET_VERSION=HEAD

before_install:
- git clone https://github.com/greghendershott/travis-racket.git
- cat travis-racket/install-racket.sh | bash # pipe to bash not sh!

script:
 - /usr/racket/bin/raco make main.rkt
 - /usr/racket/bin/raco test -x .

The key points:

• RACKET_VERSION is the version of Racket you want to be downloaded, installed, and used.

• RACKET_VERSION can be specified mulitple times. Travis CI will run a build for each version.

• The script section says what should be run. For a simple project this might consist of running raco make on one or more files, and running raco test on all files. Just raco test might be sufficient. If you have a makefile, it could simply be make. You get the idea.

If your repo is for a Racket package

If your repo is for a Racket package, and your info.rkt has a deps listing some dependencies, there’s a more elegant way to do the script: section. Let’s say your repo name is foo:

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script:
- cd ..   # Travis did a cd into the dir. Back up, for the next:
- /usr/racket/bin/raco pkg install --deps search-auto --link foo
- /usr/racket/bin/raco test -x -p foo

Using the --link option of raco pkg install lets you install a package locally. The --deps search-auto option will automatically install all the deps from your info.rkt, and, do so without asking.

Then, using -p foo with raco test tells it that foo is an installed package. (I also use the -x flag because I only put tests inside (module+ test) submodules, and don’t want raco test to run other code. But if you put tests in top-level modules, you’ll want to omit that.)

How and why does this work?

In the before_install step, Racket is installed by obtaining² a install-racket.sh script and piping it to bash. The install-racket.sh script figures out where to download the Ubuntu 64-bit Racket installer for the specified RACKET_VERSION, uses curl to download it, and runs it using the default values.

Below is the current version, as I write this blog post. You can look at the latest here.

Most of the work here is simply translating a version string like 5.3.5 or 6.0 or HEAD into the location from which it can be downloaded.

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# IMPORTANT: Your .travis.yml must pipe this to bash (not to sh)!
# In the Travis CI environment a #!/bin/bash shebang here won't help.

set -e

if [[ "$RACKET_VERSION" = "HEAD" ]]; then
    URL="http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/snapshots/current/installers/racket-current-x86_64-linux-precise.sh"
elif [[ "$RACKET_VERSION" = 5.9* ]]; then
    URL="http://download.racket-lang.org/installers/${RACKET_VERSION}/racket-${RACKET_VERSION}-x86_64-linux-ubuntu-quantal.sh"
elif [[ "$RACKET_VERSION" = 6.0* ]]; then
    URL="http://download.racket-lang.org/installers/${RACKET_VERSION}/racket-${RACKET_VERSION}-x86_64-linux-ubuntu-precise.sh"
else
    URL="http://download.racket-lang.org/installers/${RACKET_VERSION}/racket/racket-${RACKET_VERSION}-bin-x86_64-linux-debian-squeeze.sh"
fi

INSTALL="./racket-${RACKET_VERSION}.sh"

echo "Downloading $URL to $INSTALL:"
curl -L -o $INSTALL $URL

echo "Running $INSTALL to install Racket:"
chmod u+rx "$INSTALL"
sudo "$INSTALL" <<EOF
no
/usr/racket

# EOF

exit 0

Caveats and Conclusion

The Ubuntu 64-bit Racket installer is about 75 MB. This is downloaded and installed every time Travis CI runs your test. Although it’s relatively quick (single digit seconds), it is a bit wasteful of bandwidth.

Feel free to use this. Maybe have fun understanding how it works. Perhaps even point out some improvements I could make. However do keep in mind this is an interim hack rather than the long-term solution.